CSS4P seminar #1: Computational Social Science for Social Inclusion

The increasing availability of digital trace data presents substantial opportunities for researchers and policy makers to better understand the importance of social networks and social interactions in fostering economic opportunity and resilience. The tangible and intangible resources that individuals can access through their social networks—that is, the social capital available to them—are central to fostering their resilience to a range of economic shocks, from recessions to health emergencies to environmental disasters. Understanding the relationships between social interactions and economic outcomes is therefore of central importance to policy makers.

In his presentation, Prof. Stroebel will review recent research efforts that have studied these questions using data from a wide range of sources, in particular, using online social networking platform such as Facebook.

The presentation will focus on two research applications of computational social science, one on the ground-breaking work of Chetty et al. (2022a) and Chetty et al. (2022b) published on Nature on Social Capital and Social Connectedness, and one on an ongoing work of Bailey et al. (2022) on the social integration of Syrian migrants in Germany.

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About the speaker

Johannes Stroebel is the David S. Loeb Professor of Finance and the Boxer Faculty Fellow at the New York University Stern School of Business. He joined NYU in 2013 from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he was the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Economics.

Professor Stroebel conducts research in climate finance, household finance, social network analysis, macroeconomics, and real estate economics.

He has won numerous awards, including the AQR Asset Management Institute Young Researcher Prize and the Brattle Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Finance. He has also won an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Economics. Professor Stroebel is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, and the Journal of Finance. Professor Stroebel is also a member of the Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Professor Stroebel read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Merton College, Oxford, where he won the Hicks and Webb Medley Prize for the best performance in Economics.

He earned a Ph.D. in Economics at Stanford University, where he held the Bradley and Kohlhagen Fellowships at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.